general

This is an excellent textbook for software developers with sufficient experience and discipline to produce professional software. It is not a philosophical treatise or a book on skills. It is not to be read casually before bedtime. In order to get something out of it, you must carry out the assignments.

The PSP training is an iterative process, slowly enhancing your process. The PSP is all about gathering data, devising improvements, and seeing the improvements through. The assignments in the book are challenging enough to require some design and have enough lines of code that you can gather data.

Over the course of the book, you'll make up to six enhancements to your proces, to the point that you have the experience to develop your own processes. If you carry out the book assignments, you'll also have some basic tools for measuring your software (lines of code counters) and process (statistical software).

In order to be effective with the PSP (or software in general), you need to follow good software design practices. The PSP enables you to capture the data that show this. Good design, though, is outside the scope of this book.

This book was the textbook for a PSP course for engineers I just completed. The course was a lot of work. In order to get something out of it, I had to be disciplined. In order to get something out of the book, you'll need to be very disciplined because you won't have the structure of a class to ensure you carry out your assignments. The PSP does not work without discipline to capture good time and defect data and to follow the process improvements.

If you have successfully learned the PSP process, be it in a formal classrom setting or through this book, you will be able to give estimates of size and time that are +/- 10% with a confidence of 70%. Of course large projects require larger processes than the Personal Software Process--those are outside the scope of this book. For an industry that is plagued by over-estimates, this is an excellent first step for engineering at the individual level.

When I flipped thru it at the book store it looked interesting. When I started to read it at home my eyes glazed over. The subject is very interesting, too bad the book is so boring.

Analyze your personal software development performance as a self-improvement initiative. Categorize time in phases and record the amount of time spent on each assigned task in each phase. Develop historical databases of size and productivity as illustrated by the project-planning framework (Fig 5.1). Compare initial estimates of size, effort, and schedule versus actual size, effort, and schedule (management metrics). Track defects, classify defects, identify problem components, and establish reliability measurements (product metrics). Presents the goal-question-metric, design and code reviews, cost-of-quality measures, unit testing, defect prevention strategies, and verification process. Includes a set of exercises that put the PSP program into practice. The appendix contains an excellent section on statistical techniques and a complete set of forms and instructions for implementing the various PSP measurement programs. Some questionable practices: the author insists on counting compiler errors as defects, the author uses compiler errors in reliability metrics calculations, and the author recommends performing a code review before compiling the program.

A quote from the author, "In addition to providing the data you need to handle management pressure, the PSP offers many other potential benefits as follows: The insight you gain into your talents and abilities; The stimulation of an almost unlimited stream of improvement ideas; The framework it provides for personal improvement; The degree of control you gain over your work; The feeling of pride and personal accomplishment; An improved basis for effective teamwork; The conviction to do the job the way you know you should."